Alexey Bogolepov

Interface/Container

Things built according to a manual are more of an exception than a rule. In this sense we are
fortunate to live in an environment that carries such a deep imprint of intentional design. This
reality was built by adepts of general organizational theory, who projected their program through
five-year rhythms. Their plan took shape in a polarizing moment that launched a movement
towards one classic attractor a closed, centralized system.
Chronic vulnerabilities of this condition are taught to every student of the Academy of Public
Administration invariance, data stagnation, malfunctions of the center. Yet value judgements
set aside, it was this organized impulse in a single direction that left behind itself a wake of
resemblant objects, forms, and patterns. Each specimen from this current is a local simulation of
the catastrophe that gave birth to it. This is what we perceive as morphological isolation of soviet
modernism, and what enables us to speak of an isomorphism between, for example, modernist
propaedeutics and structure of a modernist state. The entire complex is self-similar, integrated
and permeated by a multidirectional transport system that carries operators, which enforce
directives of the abstract machines.
Two such operators are examined here mediation and containment. The first, mediation, occurs
when one element squeezes itself between two others, making itself an indispensable link. The
businessman is a middleman between the customer and the good, the priest a mediator between
the parishioner and the deity, the party an interface between the citizen and the truth. The
second operator is containment, specifically in the sense of a container encasing content. From
the Corbusian living unit to esoterics of border control, containerization has developed into an
overgrown modernist fetish. Post-soviet space is symbolically annotated and heavily
containerized. It is filled with mediatory markers and cascades of hierarchies that arrange
ideological accents and consolidate chains of subordination.
When connections break, what is left are empty containers and objects taken out of context.
One of the key processes of contemporaneity is a revision of these assets, loading them with new
substance, often unrelated to the original one. This is further complicated by an agency of
form, which exhibits a memory effect and refuses to passively accept just any new content. A
clear understanding of these processes is the first step towards reprogramming them.